


[Meta] Lifeamgood on the Justice Side of the Street

by fresne



Category: JLU - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2005-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:03:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 16,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of meta on various JL/JLU episodes that steam the consciousness. No, seriously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Line Item in the R&D Budget - "Secret Origins

**Author's Note:**

> These were originally posted on lifeamgood.com. I originally wrote these piecemeal. Mostly internal reflections of ideas and moments. However, as time and tide flows (although it ruins my numbers in terms of how many stories are here), I'd been thinking for awhile about bringing them here. So here they are.
> 
>  
> 
> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.

An idea from the last Superman movie, you know one of the ones that didn't exist once "Superman Returns". Superman in his quest for peace throws all the nuclear weapons into the place best for them. The sun. The source of his power. Yellow and warm and oops, that was a bad idea it seems.

White Martians. Green Martian. 

Heroes coming together while the shadow lurks. 

Batman he's not a member.

He's just paying for the club house. 

And showing up all the time.

And paying for the club's jet.

And... yeah, okay fine. It's a conceit.

But you know. A Justice League with two heavy hitting female characters, and a black Green Lantern. An awesome Green Lantern. 

Darkness and so on. Watchout. Watch tower watches.


	2. Dream a little Dream - Only A Dream

It fell circle this. 

I came into comic books in college reading Sandman. My first exposure to JL (outside of Hanna Barbera) was John Dee. How fall he's fallen from alchemist. Thief of the Dreamlord's Ruby. That horrifying time in the diner where he drove the inhabitants mad. Then dead. Then bored. Then relieved of dreams.

My first Martian Manhunter moment with Morpheus as Lord Shaper to a shape shifter. 

So, this was a very interesting episode. Redolent with that first sharp sweet encounter with comic horror. With complex juicy and there they were. Trapped in their minds. Superman afraid of not weakness. Oh, not that. Man of steel cuts through the world. Hawkgirl in a box. 

While Batman, well, don't want to be in his head. Of course not.

Still, I do think after this all was over. There was a ruby. There was a diner. Horror and blood and Lord Shaper come to get his property.


	3. Tank for the Wedding - Maid of Honor

There are times I think there is no Justice that there aren't fifty million femme flash stories from this one. Diana and Audrey. They partied in Paris. Diana with no mask. Why would she need such. She's a princess and powerful and she can fly.

There's brutal separation due to an arranged marriage with an immortal neanderthal. There's a tank thrown at the wedding. Wonder Woman being truly powerful and Batman being pretty freaking sneaky. Although a decent dancer.

Dance at the wedding. But still, nothing could beat the falling tank.


	4. Fire Pretty, Tree Pretty – Heart and Soul

There was something incredibly stiring about that moment when J’onn looked at those wall carvings that no one could read. This was an episode whose emphasis was on sight and understanding. The images of the eternal fire and of a gnarled tree. Read by J’onn, last child of a dead world. A world whose soul is gone.

That the story would resolve in the transformation of the fire that dwells in the desert and inspires new/fanatical religion into a world tree that ripples and spreads. The leader of the fire religion, who genuinely believes in it, is misusing the world fire because he only sees it through his third mystic eye. It is when J'onn steps into the fire and is consumed by it that the fire burns from eyes normal and mystic and is free to become.

The soldiers sent to conquer flying through space enveloped in protective flames then twisting in metamorphosis into trees. The leader himself first crying as his flame goes out, “…do not forsake me.” And then as the world tree wraps him in vines saying, “At last I see…Paradise.” Before being pulled beneath the earth. 

I’m still mulling the images. The trees in space was somehow a particularly powerful image. The parallel between the two Johns who carry on the fight with the fanatical. As J'onn attempts to communicate with the fire, John hitting/imprinting the green lantern symbol on our villain's third eye. Oh and Hawkgirl's sudden deepening into character.

As John-Green Lantern (a object that grants light/sight, controlled green fire) would say, "Through experience we gain clarity."


	5. It is a far, far better thing I do, red wine on pavement – A Better World

Ah, Justice League. Now, that rocked in all the ways that a rock can rock.

Almost a political polemic and yet, so deeply rooted in the cannon of the comics that, well, how then.

The thought that the Justice Lord Superman’s Lois never went to yet another alternate dimension where that dark Superman wounded internal over his Lois’ death struck a slightly different deal with Lex Luthor. A gothic totalitarian regime with robots and law and order and everything in darkness. Course the worm in that apple was that Luthor killed that Lois in the first place. So, then. Love was gone and darkness reigned.

The Justice Lord Superman has his love in a tower. Bitter and slashing and serving gazpacho soup, which is cold. Cold. Ah, true love in a world where everything is bright and shiny and all the villains are nicely lobotomized. Even, eco-terrorist Poison Ivy, cutting off the roses from the bushes and leaving only the green.

I loved the way the two Batman’s kept throwing their parents at one another. The tragedy that shaped them into Dark Crusader. Here, no other eight year old boy will grieve over his murdered parents. True, and our parents would be so proud of you if they were alive. As we watch and complaining guy at a restaurant arrested for complaining too loud that 5+5 do not make 15.

I’m inclined to think that Darkly Lording Batman, if only subconsciously, set all this in motion perhaps to end this totalitarian reign in his cave that’s the only dark place left. The only one with no powers but his mind. He was always the smart one.

Perhaps, the same people who’d elect Lex Luthor as president can’t be trusted, skipping into WWIII. Perhaps such trust will kill bouncing, darting Flash, who isn’t so much the group’s conscience, as the eternally shiny 8 year old child that they seek to protect, which given Flash’s history is interesting. The red fast pounding heart that rushes in and says stupid things and believes. Doesn’t know what he can do till he does it. 

It was fascinating how natural each heroes turn toward the totalitarian light felt and how many seemed rooted in the childhood traumas that drew them into heroism in the first place. The longing for safety. Make the world safe and clean and ordered.

It really ought to have been cheesy when JL Superman picked up that American flag and righted it to wave gentle in the breeze. But if so, then it’s a cheese that’s finely aged. Truth, Justice and a breeze on the Moon to ripple the flag. Mom and apple pie and a Superman who never got past his first merit badge. Who is every day is greeted with the temptations that power is heir to. Linking back to his dream a few episodes back that he’ll just keep getting more powerful. Since, the more powerful, surely the greater the temptation to just decide that people are stupid. A lobotomy here, a civil right there and all will be white caped perfection. Every day negotiating which lines can be crossed. Trying to see the lines with eyes that cut and burn. 

Those Martian dragons circling one another. Equal. Opposite. Grappling for a dominance that can’t come, because they are the same. The only breaking deadlock coming from the dark, a true black hearted villain. The yang that helps keep Superman Clark Kent grounded yin. Not destroying Darkside, but something negotiable. Blurring lines that may yet lead to defeat. To Kingdom Coming.


	6. As Grandma Flash Always said - Eclipsed

“Why curse the dark, when you can light a 7000 watt light bulb?”

For a hero a few laps short of a marathon, Flash sure is clever.

Bring home the gold, hotshot.

The Flash running on a road of green light through space. Red and gold and green. Running to save the sun. The light, devoured by not just dark, but the cold. The empty. The dead.

In the end, the so human hero, with his tricked out Flash mobile and longing to go on a road trip (What indeed does he need with a van? Connection.), being the one to make that leap of faith.

Catch me if I fall. Falling. Drifting. Blossoms that are candles that are drifting as the warm lazy water brownian eddy flows.

As the Birthday card once read, “If a tree falls in the forest and then springs back up as a joke, do the squirrels freak out?”

I could comment on the latest JLA episode’s intro, with soldiers searching for terrorists, with its ads for heroic relief from burning stomach upset, with its references to free speech as a key part of democracy (The Greeks invented that right?), all to be taken in context with last week’s image of a totalitarian happy, happy, trip to corn field, state.

But that would not suit the mood. And accessories make the analysis.


	7. I never realized, Rob Zombie is Cthulu – The Terror Beyond

JL – It Came from Beyond. Beyond what? What borders of the imagination. Of the heart? Soul? Mind? Reality as a thing that can tear and fissure. It’s tissue thin. Bumbling around like Solomon Grundy gathering gold. Longing for the other thing.

I can’t say as I ever expected anyone to make Solomon Grundy, um…interesting. The Hanna Barbera character floats in my memory. That shallow, dead, wandering crushing thing. And yet, there it is. Everyone has a story. Even Hawkgirl is aware, “Excuse me now, Hawkgirl smash.” when discussing her propensity to play the bad cop, “Why play against type?

Hawkgirl, who it seems, has no faith. Her prayer is a chant to drive away her discarded god. Her weapon of un-magic breaking the chains into stairs of Echer star space. The sky and the earth confused. Up is sidewise. Dr. Fate. The man behind the mask.

Wonder Woman, who it seems doesn’t just call on the Greek gods as a manner of speech. In exile, her beliefs define her. Give her strength. 

The sheer unexpectedness of Aquaman being the one to say, “Faith isn’t something you understand, it’s something you just have.” Unable to hear the creatures of the sea, never the less having faith that the connection remains. 

There’s been this repetition of the joke that the JL is the Just us League. In the season premiere, Hawkgirl, musing on how most of the team members are exiled, lost, last remnants, orphaned, isolated, states that they should rename themselves into what they are. Later in the season, a talk show host uses the same term to define the Justice League as exclusionary. As Justice Lords from on high.

I am reminded of last season’s running “joke?” that most of the Justice League members don’t know Batman’s history. Thus comments from J'onn that Batman can’t know how he (J’onn) longs to see his long dead loved ones again. Wonder Woman musing what it would do to a person to be orphaned in such a violent manner. That every time Batman, or, his opposite in spectrum, Flash are injured, shirts are removed, but the masks remain. 

But neither Flight of flash nor Dark of Knight were in this episode, rather that other most famous  
son of a dead world.

On Friday I bought Gaiman’s new Sandman anthology. And there in the story of Dream, his little sister Despair at the start of things (before Delight dissolved into Delirium, before Death had learned to smile, when Desire was Dream’s favorite sybil-ing) is talking to a star. And Despair tells the star that the most exquisite work of art would be to create a civilization on an inherently unstable world. How extreme every moment of joy in the presence of such inevitable loss. And how much better if one survivor was to escape that world in order to preserve the magnitude of that loss. What a poem to despair.

And so we have Superman, who Hawkgirl asks, “Does it chafe straddling the fence like that.” Although, as past episodes show, that hovering is a choice. The alternative in absolute conviction is the slide up to ruling the world. To concentrate on the super is to forget the man. I’m not sure his faith is so much in himself (for all that he plays a Christ figure at times), but in people. Really, what else can he do?

That wonderful glance and sigh in this episode as much to say, “Why are you making me kick your ass.” as anything else. After asking, asking for an explanation, kick so and so’s dead posterior. Okay, fight now, whatever. Sigh. Now can we talk!

But really this is about Hawkgirl’s lack of faith. Or rather her sense that faith has too high a price. Her people’s faith in Icuthulu (heh, ichthus + cuthulu, cute) cost them their souls. And without gods or dreaming belief , she is a Valkyrie without portfolio, embassy, rainbow bridging promise. Lost in a strange land of strange ideas. Bad cop, “I’d give you a gesture, but my hands are tied.” Hawkgirl smash. Well, there’s always the Just-us League.

And as I wait for tonight’s new whelm of episodes, I contemplate Angel, who has lost faith. Hope. Reduced to playing at bad cop, whose mercy is spent. Angel smash as an attempt to reconnect with the ineffable thing that he has lost. Not his soul, but his heart.

Solomon Grundy,  
Born on a Monday,  
Christened on a Tuesday,  
Married on a Wednesday,  
Took ill in Thursday,  
Worse on Friday,  
Died on Saturday,  
Buried on Sunday,  
This is the end  
Of Solomon Grundy.


	8. The divisive side to heroism - Secret Society

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  
The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.  
Surely some revelation is at hand;  
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"  
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  
The darkness drops again; but now I know  
That twenty centuries of stony sleep  
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?  
The Second Coming - Yeats  


Slouching, focused villains. Unlike Luthor’s little cadre, not divided by squabbles, rather the reverse. The vision. The passionate intensity that looses mere anarchy on the earth. 

Here now, hey now it is the heroes who must be the all stars. Drink the bitter dram to its fullest dreg that taints the cheering sweet. Wave Flash, and know that all is not well.

The stress and warp and end of these heroes who are people. Who sometimes say what they should not, as people will. Who act and choose and aren’t always heroes in their own estimation.

Green Lantern, because it’s his background, tries to forge the group together based on methods that work in the Military (Marines or Green Lantern core). However, such methods are predicated on the breakdown of the individual. Planning away individuality to create cogs in a machine.

And these heroes are quintessential heterogeneous, who must nevertheless work together to get over there. Do that thing. 

Made only worse by the fact that they a heterogeneous group of severely traumatized people that have expressed that trauma by assuming these other selves. 

J’onn not even wearing his own face around his closest associates. His new family. This strange alien place. 

Batman, as illustrated by Batman Beyond, disassociated to the point that he internally calls himself by his created shadow self’s name. Bruce is the mask. Or alternatively that most protected locked away eight year old boy.

In Superman’s case, the weird dichotomy that it is as Superman that he exposes himself without the shield of glasses. One of my favorite bits in Kingdom Come being when Wonder Woman gives him his glasses so that he can see not just as Super, but as a man.

Kingdom Come Superman versus Captain Marvel. Capes and mad sanity. Superman and Wonder Woman and Batman. Milk and water and coffee. Black and keep it coming.

Superman, insisting that he be the one to take the villains blows, because only he is strong enough. Invulnerable. 

As Superman has accumulated powers to himself(that fear/dream that he will just keep growing stronger and more alone), so has he gathered up that Christ the martyr aura. With great powers comes…burdens. Crosses. Cu Cuhulain tied to his tree so that he can fight as his wounds increase. Osiris in his tree. Odin on his tree for three days and nights for knowledge’s sake. Christ then on his cross. And the blood of the lamb that is the lion.

Superman puts a nicer face on it, but at it’s base, Superman’s martyrdom to heroism is the same complex that has Batman bataranging hapless proto Zeta-bots before his team can get to them.

Orphan. Last survivor. Adopted child. 

Given the primacy that we as a culture give to the martyr (the one who falls on the grenade, remember the Alamo, etc.), the episode explored a wonderful uneasiness with Superman’s (and as I mentioned by extension Batman’s) insistence on donning that mantle. Bearing that burden alone, because the League is by its nature a communal effort.


	9. Chewing the leather to make it soft - Hereafter/Afterlife

I have this growing sense that the episodes aren’t meant to be taken as so much a continuous progression as echoing chords. Hereafter, as a response to Secret Society. The left hand of unease and the right of respect. Evoking a longing to connect this and this and this. 

Superman may have died in a DC publicity stunt, but nevertheless, he died.

Of course, there are clouds and thunder on Golgotha. The thunder cracks. The fabric of the temple is split and all is poised. Waiting. The signifier part of martyr. What it means to those who remain.

“Matter can’t be created or destroyed, just changed from one form into another.”

The tomb is empty. Full fathoms five, Mr. Wizard, put aside your books. Break the staff. Make the past undone. A trinity spun into 3 times 10,000 years. The vortex that was once black in Savage Time, now light and life and redemption. Forgiving trespasses provided you hold out your hand and ask. Contemplation and suffering and issues. Lots of issues.

“Believe it or not, I’ll miss him too.”

“The immigrant from the stars who taught us all how to be heroes.”

“The Justice League is about more than physical power…ideals, helping, caring.”

Why do you need Superman? The main man is strong. Well nigh invulnerable in a “spoonlike” way. But there is no spoon. Only the will remains. Mourned even by the one who doesn’t think he is dead. By one who hated him into missing. By that whose who of characters. Points of Enabled connection.

Powers do not make Kal-el, Clark Kent a hero. Not the sun’s light, but light itself. Empowering, life bringing, warmth.

Fighting and falling into light. To fly. Yellow and not red. Not blood washing away sins, but a sword forged on a stone. Arthur is not dead, but in transit. The future is far away coming. 

Consider that if in that moment, Superman had not returned, Batman probably would have died from a stray One-shot. 

The Justice League at the memorial, looking for Batman. Not a full member? It’s Batman’s playhouse. Batman’s toys. Ever fighting the never ending battle. Doing his best work in the dark.


	10. Viva Las Vegas - Wild Cards

Ace. Black clover in her hair. Delirium’s child. All her delight soured to gothic anger and silence. Going nowhere. Slowly. Her crown abandoned. Her one eyed jailer laughing madness, not from gaze, but from Joker’s poppy. 

Ace. Her gaze spinning perception into rats and frogs and the dissolution of self. Crippling even the one whose mind is not a pleasant place to be. Insanity and determination is no defense against madness.

The extended quality of gaze in a city that is entirely artifice. Las Vegas - where Metropolis’ boroughs meet Karnac’s pyramids and Gotham’s gothic and hey gold miners in large. In miniature. Volcanoes spew fire on command and Atlantis is a ride. 

This city of artificial lights and illusions optical cleared of everyone but the villains and the heroes and the gaze. The camera men that wander into shot as Batman or Superman cross view.

The structure of the episode creates a complicity between the Joker and the viewer, which separates the viewer emotionally from the heroes. For once, we watch their story at a third remove with the action spastically pulled hither and thither and green yonder and emotional moments intersected with Joker’s exposition. Ratings Joker grins and jokes and watches. 

He isn’t there at the point of action. He doesn’t have super powers. Throwing playing cards from behind the scenes. All other self acid burned away into giggling madness. His face is his mask. The color pointing not only to killer clowns, but the whiteness of a corpse. Dead man laughing.

Harle quin plays sad valentine Columbine, longing Pierott, and even knowing, believes in her mad love. And the trickster is consumed by his last cast.

And the masks come off.

I thought it was her face, but it was just a mask.

Although, I’m not sure that just and mask should be used together.

Considering the various ways characters wear or do not wear masks.

Green Lantern is maskless. Only his eyes, the windows to his soul, the medium of gaze, shift from brown to green. Glow with the inner fire of his mutable will made immutable green. He has a uniform, but he lives openly as himself, which makes sense given his fear that he has been transformed by power into something different. By not wearing a mask, he insists upon his own un-fragmented identity. He is who he is. 

Diana does not wear a mask. It wasn’t until later in the series that she is even called by some other name. That Wonder Woman. She is Diana and there is no Diana Prince on the horizon. She wears a crown, a Xena shakram diadem of a thing. A bathing suit that leaves little to imagine. No cape. No mask.

Superman no mask and everyone knows his name, Kal-El. Last son of Krypton. And really, why do you ask about a secret identity? Clark Kent obfuscates his other life with frames meant to make the eyes see. By revealing, Clark conceals. I’m reminded of the New Adventures episode, “The death of Clark Kent” where Clark Kent is killed in front of witnesses, leaving Superman to wonder how he can deal with being steel all of the time.

J’onn Jonz doesn’t even wear his own body. His hands. His face. The shape of his eyes. All changed that he might be a bit less alien. And yet, the funny thing is that he is the most opened. Telepathic and the thoughts roll in. His clothes are his skin. Literally. Shaped by his thoughts. A fluttering cape that is an extension of the man.

Flash. Do they ever even mention his real name? We’ve seen Batman without his mask more times than Flash. Yeah, yeah, he has a secret identity because the chicks dig that sort of thing. And he’s about as complex as cherry jello. But, he never takes off the mask. He is jitter and jump and fleet footed natter and he is no one other than Flash. He’s always around. For there to be a secret identity, then the mask would have to come off and he’d have to be Wally some of the time. And he never does and I wonder why.

And then there’s Batman, whose mask is his face and Bruce exists to support the Bat. Bruce did not deal with loss well, and so Bruce has been lost and the darkness remains. Goes without sleep and relentless strives to forgive that root failure that defined his life.

Oh, yeah Hawk Girl. Shayera. I had no idea that wasn’t her face. She had a different mask in A Better World, but I thought that her face, hawkish and feathered was just under there. Not a mask. Of any character, we know that she can’t have a secret identity. Her face to conceal, but not wings. And yet this vulnerable, inner soft features and self. Sublimated to a mace and “Excuse me, Hawk Girl smash now.”

But GL sees only a man and a woman and that’s all we see too as the Jackpot flashes and the blue marble earth looms.

Big as a world. Small as a fragile. It’s all in the perspective.


	11. Comfort and Joy - Um - Comfort and Joy

How cute was GL and Hawk Girl’s snow ball fight. And Hawk Girl’s secret life as a Klingon. Gagh=Blurb. 

How cute was Flash what with the toy and the orphans and the shopping and the aluminum tree.

How cute was J’onn growing into his sweater. How cute was Ma Kent giving J’onn a sweater in the first place. Although, seriously, what giant creature was she making it for?

How cute was “Clark’s” whole hearted leap into Christmas. His insistence that Santa delivers his presents. That one line, “Lead.”

How cute were Ma and Pa Kent. Label me a softie and brand me a sweet tooth, but there’s nothing I love so much as a long married couple who kiss while washing the dishes. Time worn, with plenty of room for aliens.

Now then, to prove that I can in fact wring rambling out of a sugar cube…

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen  
God rest ye merry gentlemen,  
Let nothing ye dismay,  
Remember Christ our Savior  
Was born on Christmas day,  
To save us all from Satan's pow'r  
When we were gone astray;  
O tidings of comfort and joy,  
Comfort and joy,  
O tidings of comfort and joy…  
"Fear not," then said the angel,  
"Let nothing ye affright,  
This day is born a Savior,  
Of virtue, power, and might;  
So frequently to vanquish all  
The friends of Satan quite";  
O tidings of comfort and joy,  
Comfort and joy,  
O tidings of comfort and joy...

In too short a half hour, three stories of both comfort and joy. The Ulta-Humanite may say “Bah, humbug,” to begin, but even he is drawn into the jejune spirit of making things better. You know, rather than blowing up ugly art with his ray gun.

An episode of little vanquishing. More offering comfort. Expressing joy. Even if that joy is a bar fight. Then again, maybe comfort & joy is how you vanquish Satan’s little friends.

When I was a child, I, as so many children do, believed in Santa. That mysterious and magical figure who gave and never asked. Now at a certain point, I discovered, as children who hide under tables will, that Santa was in fact my parents. 

This realization delighted me in a way that I cannot really express. You see, if my parents could be Santa, then so could I. While I might be small, I could still participate in this vast conspiracy. Promote magic in the world. 

I remember getting up at some dark and dreary hour and leaving little packages for my parents with a note that Saint Nicholas had been there. Giggling and twitching and waiting, oh the hours, waiting for my parents to get up. 

It is this realization that I saw wash over J’onn. That it’s not all vanquishing through gravity. That the pleasure of magic is cookies, which I note were the Trinitarian Oreo. 

Once more the breaching theme of identity. Aspects of the whole. Not so much a question of the mask, but what costume is worn that day. 

GL’s fondest Christmas memory isn’t of presents, but of sledding in the park. Snow angels and snow men and snow ball fights. GL understands the malleability of snow. 

While, Hawk Girl celebrates glowing joy through bar fights in what would appear to be a hive of scum and villainy. 

When Superman is home, he wears glasses and is himself. Too skinny, and nice and cozy, and peeks at presents, and rushes to turn on the Christmas tree lights and is this bouncy bundle of small town. Pennants in his room. Family portraits on the walls.

Flash, a hero in red and the toy he brings. Granting one wish for a shared thing. Just one big heart, isn’t he? Delighting in the act of providing both comfort and joy to those who truly need it. Cause yeah, Flash wants to play Santa too. Even if he has to run to Japan to do it. Stands there all undone because his gift is broken.

How fortunate for Flash that the little boy that breaks the DJ rubber ducky/Nutcracker is simultaneously the mysterious uncle who can bind the toy’s jaw up. Make it talk and live and enchant in its circle of glowing light. Enjoy a light show of candy canes and sugar plum faeries beneath an aluminum tree.

The writers set us up by talking about Gorilla Grodd, super intelligent mind controlling ape, and give us the Ultra Humanite, super intelligent mind shaping ape. Grodd wants to rule the world. The Ultra-Humanite mostly seems to want to want a Fraiser Crane world. Grodd almost split the JL through internal tensions. Ultra-Humanite split from Lex’s un-Justice League in exchange for more funding for PBS. The humanism in Humanite versus Flash’s encompassing joyful give. Loving his enemies as it were. 

Maybe it’s just me, but the ornament on the top of the orphanage’s Christmas tree looks less like a star and more like a cross. Scrollgirl has an incredibly apropos quote from ( Luke 6:27-36 ) Giving to the orphans was cute and easy. Giving to the Ultra-Humanite was not only talking the talk, but walking the hard narrow high walk.

The Christmas in Smallville story had personal resonance. I have fond/cold memories of visiting relatives in South Dakota for Christmas. My grandmother attends a church that looks very much like that snowy Christmas bound building. Well, smaller, but equally snowy on a Christmas Eve. When all the world is white and vast and the winds blow across the plains to icy degree. 

There’s just something so moving about J’onn wearing his own shape at the end of the episode. Singing. Watching the sun rise over a world made new by snow.

I’ve seen that vista. Sitting in the window at my grandparent’s farm. The vast distances of the prairie that seemed to go on forever. The infinite sky of the dawn. The pale rose to gold and white and softest blue. The tiny knot of humanity huddled on the table top vast. The cheery blinking lights on the water tower warding and guiding as you tromped your way into town. Cold feet and wind chill and humming carols.

It came upon the midnight clear,  
That glorious song of old,  
From angels bending near the earth,  
To touch their harps of gold;  
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,  
From Heaven’s all gracious King.”  
The world in solemn stillness lay,  
To hear the angels sing.  
Still through the cloven skies they come  
With peaceful wings unfurled,  
And still their heavenly music floats  
O’er all the weary world;  
Above its sad and lowly plains,  
They bend on hovering wing,  
And ever over its Babel sounds  
The blessèd angels sing.  
Yet with the woes of sin and strife  
The world has suffered long;  
Beneath the angel strain have rolled  
Two thousand years of wrong;  
And man, at war with man, hears not  
The love-song which they bring;  
O hush the noise, ye men of strife  
And hear the angels sing.  
And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,  
Whose forms are bending low,  
Who toil along the climbing way  
With painful steps and slow,  
Look now! for glad and golden hours  
Come swiftly on the wing.  
O rest beside the weary road,  
And hear the angels sing!  
For lo! the days are hastening on,  
By prophet-bards foretold,  
When with the ever circling years  
Comes round the age of gold;  
When peace shall over all the earth  
Its ancient splendors fling,  
And the whole world send back the song  
Which now the angels sing.

J’onn flys and alights to hear singing. The mystic of the group. Last parent of a world lost to war. Rather than the Babel of separate voices cacophony, a united thought, “Peace on the earth, good will to men.”

Credulous, jejune, childish, childlike – Santa mugs and oversized sweaters and little gestures. Joining the Santa Conspiracy. A Christmas Carol. A Christmas card.

Comfort and joy to you and you and you. Peace on earth, good will to men.


	12. Romeo and Juliet they are Not - Starcrossed

More than anything this episode convinced me that the writers are full and well aware of their play with masks and identity. Costumes and humanity. Masks conceal, but equally they present the face that we want to show. 

Batman’s mask, his costume, doesn’t just conceal Bruce Wayne. It embodies the darkness and fear that he wishes to present. That perfect blending with the shadows where he dwells. 

Wally West’s mask displays the bright and the red and the shiny beating heart that he is. A man who is optimistic in the face of loss. A red haired boy who collapses to the floor at Batman’s farewell. A masked hero who hugs Hawk Girl good bye. He isn’t the smartest tack, but sometimes, that’s not what’s needed.

Superman’s bright red, um…yellow, and blue, are all the colors of, not so much the American way, as the primary way. Superman representing CMYK in a printed world. Even though I know differently, I want to call that color palate: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Kryptonite. 

The primary palate characters blend with blacK (or K for Key) to create, enable, a colorful world. As the Justice League’s Watchtower hovers in the interstitial of orbit, our heroes watch over this fragile sphere in the vast black K of the universe from a distance. Well, for a little while.

The season began with the Watchtower. Hawk Girl, her name not in common use, joking to J'onn that the Justice League should rename themselves the Just Us League, because most of the members are alone. Kal El/Superman, Krypton's last son. J’onn/Martian Manhunter, Mars’ last son. Wonder Woman/Diana, exiled from her paradise. Batman/? in his brood. And Hawk Girl/Shayera herself, lost to her people with no way home. Well, that last one, not so much.

Of them all, I didn't suspect that Hawk Girl had a secret identity. I mean, she can't blend in. The wings kind of give it away and yet, and yet…she wasn't who she said she was. Then again, until mid second season, I had no idea she was wearing a mask.. Her self was secret. Her face hidden. Her emotional life buried. A woman with a mission. And in the end, the love that sways her isn’t love for an individual, but love for the entire world of individuals that she looked at in the season premiere. Not Just Us, but Justice stripped of masks and symbols and everything but the belief that there must be another way. 

Well, really that was the episode all over.

The wonderful simplicity of the moment when the character who trusts the least, names the names behind the masks, and ends by giving his own. And more importantly, in the face of necessity, Batman lets his friends into his cave beneath the earth, which is the antithesis to Watchtower. The Watchtower hangs glittering above, alone in the dark. The cave is the dark, is the vast small earth itself; as the Hawkmen crouch on the Daily Planet’s globe and impose their, it’s for your own good, martial law. 

The Just Us League. Last sons and exiles. 

Men on a roof throwing rocks at enemies they can’t hope to overcome. A restaurant owner calling to two strangers, “Come in here.” Calmly lying to the men with wings, who’d use our world for its surface tension, to skip their stones.

I loved the image of the Aesir-esk Thanagarian high council willing to sacrifice some blue marble on the other side of the universe. Versus Hawk Girl’s delightful transition from feathered Hawk Girl mask to Lieutenant in military helmet to exposed face, to Shayera. Yes, of course, the helmet mask was her Lorder, A Better World face. Hard and curved and willing to abridge a few civil liberties and imprison her erstwhile friends, if it’s for some greater good. It is some greater good right? 

Well, not so much. Time and distance and wounds mean that she no longer knows her fiancée. What lay beneath her lover’s mask was a tracery of scars that she couldn’t understand. When her long ago lover went to lift her mask in a moment of emotional honesty, they were interrupted by the mission. Masks stayed in place until it is no longer possible for Shayera to say, “I was under orders.” There are some costs that are too high. She cannot sacrifice one people to save another. 

It’s a choice that first strips her mask, then her symbol, her costume, and eventually causes her to leave her place in the Justice League. Revealing a woman, vulnerable, sipping her cup of tea in t-shirt, jeans, and some very nice 2” heel boots. Feeling small and wanting another inch of height. Well, understandable. Rather than tear the League of Heroes apart, she chooses self-exile. 

Exile. Just Us. Last sons of dead worlds and exiles from distant places. The masks come off and they are…well, they are who they were all along.

The face that J'onn chooses to wear is the face that he wore when he went to Smallville for Christmas with Clark. Tall and thin and ordinary. Hardly threatening at all, except with a camera flash. Or I suppose more technically that was the costume, the real face was J’onn swinging electrified num chucks.

Anyway, after they have left their costumes behind, Bruce Wayne and Diana choose to rescue with their powers and abilities. While, Clark saves Wally and GL by being Clark, runs up and is that annoying reporter, “If you could just answer a few questions.” Well, it’s how Clark started the episode, protecting an important conference and covering the story of the conference at the same time. It’s not about power, it’s about knowing how to apply it.

Men throwing rocks from roofs at Bird men with guns. Batman in space, throwing the Watchtower at a machine that would consume the world. I do wonder if the moment that Batman took off his mask, he wasn’t already three steps ahead to the sacrifice that he might have to make. Of all the characters, the shadow, who is all human, makes the choice to die for the Earth. The hero who is fueled by the sun choosing to turn away from the mission to save the individual. 

Not to get too Trekkie, but it was a very fine example of the needs of the many versus the needs of the one. Heroes striving for both Just and Fair. 

Standing there, looking at the burning fire in the desert, Superman standing in his classic pose, Batman crouched on the ground. The ease of their exchange,  
“Always have to be the hero.”  
“Right back at you.”

Meanwhile, back in the good fight, Diana, the wonderful woman and classic third in this Trinity, stalks through corridors with a sword. Defeats minions and gives Shayera mercy, freedom to act, and that final moment of reckoning with lost loves.

“No Javelin, Watchtower, no Hawk Girl is this the end of the Justice League?” Don’t worry Flash, the league isn’t Just Us. As next season expands from a league of a few heroes, to an unlimited palate of a CMYK heroic world.


	13. Dreams - The man who has everything

It’s too bad that with the half hour format they couldn’t really delve into the creepiness below the surface in the Moore original comic, but okay.

The benefits of a televised medium had its perks.

Clark’s love interest as this intriguing blend of Lana + Lois. Jor-el’s voice slipping into Jonathan Kent. The implication of a rift between Jor and Kal because Kal has chosen to be a farmer. Jor-el’s bitter reflections on his predictions about the end of the world. And yet from the beginning the world shakes. Fields of golden grain under a red sun. In Superman’s fantasy, the dog has accidents on the floor and the birth of his son was the happiest day of his life. That even as he destroys his own heart’s desire dream, he holds his son in his arms and cries. Kal/Clark can’t just wake up. He has to destroy Krypton again. Only this time, he’s there to see it all. 

It made think of nothing so much as Picard living a lifetime in a few minutes.

And then there’s Batman. The sheer horrific deliciousness that in Batman’s fantasy, the mugger who killed his parents speaks with his own voice. The Mask of Zorro, happy California hero in the sun, but tears for pearls are always destined to fall. 

The wrongness of that black and white fantasy where Bruce’s father takes the upper hand and beats and beats and beats on the mugger. The dread of the overwhelming shadow that consumes his father. It’s a little less clear than with Clark, but I think to awake Bruce had to kill his parent’s over again. 

I did kind of want the plant whosit to land on Wonder Woman and then promptly fall off because, umm…she’s living her bliss. This life isn’t the result of a fundamental tragedy. 

Thus she gives Clark a new kind of rose. A hybrid. Something to evoke old and new. 

Although, I wonder, just how much cash does a gazillionaire give the world’s most powerful man for his birthday?


	14. Shiny Fluffy Heroes - JLU Kid's Stuff

For such a cute fluffy episode, as is so often the case with JLU, my mind is a churning with the ricochet of ideas.

When a story that is in a medium traditionally associated with children in America (cartoon) regarding a corpus of work associated with children (comic books) has an episode where the adult main characters are turned into children, I can’t help but think about what the episode is saying about what it means to be a child. Where is the end of childhood? What does it mean to be frozen in childhood?

Frozen Mordred. Static Batman. Green Lantern revisiting the fantasies of childhood. And I wonder, when, in this universe, did Diana’s childhood begin?

I suppose, I should pick a direction.

We have Mordred, whose mother, Morgan La Fey, has frozen him in childhood for centuries. How like the fey. The Fair. The mother whose face is hidden. Her body stiffly encased in metal.

She willow wisp promises Mordred power, but denies him responsibility. She could have chosen to stop his aging process at any point. The point she chooses is a doll-like pre-pubescent state. Precious. Beloved and over refined. The statement that she bathes him is played for laughs and yet…it’s just one more sign of how she denies him power over his own body. Mordred as not just a child, but an infant. This plays interestingly with the episode’s resolution of Mordred as frozen old man. Infancy and old age rendering the same result.

And unlike some child/ancient characters, Mordred is genuinely a child, not an old man trapped in a child’s body. Just as the Justice Leaguers become their child selves. The image of Mordred freezing them before the dungeon struck me as…interesting. And what lies below, but the demon self of yet another un-aging character (Etrigan/Jason Blood)

So, after centuries of empty promises, no wonder Mordred uses the power of the first magic (which by its name can be seen as both the oldest and the youngest/most elemental magic) as he does.

The world that he creates is a child’s world. He transforms the cotton candy “Happy” Land, built by adults for children, into this child’s view of Happy Land. It’s horrible and dark. There are guillotines and thorns and dark clouds. 

It mades me think of a book a friend of mine just showed me. The author asked children to draw a monster and then interviewed them about the monster. Based on the interview and initial drawing, the author (who is a fairly well known artist in comic book circles) filled in the details on the drawing. Wonderful and weird and fantastic. Valentine’s Day monsters throwing hearts. Double headed creatures (the second head was in the torso) going for a baseball double header. Horrible, terrifying, friendly. Really, the interviews were one of the most interesting parts of the book. A window into a familiar and yet alien perspective. 

Childhood. 

Childhood’s end.

Child’s play.

So, after transforming the world, what does the despotic child do? 

Mordred sits in his throne room hearing petitions from his subjects. He’s bored, but that’s what rulers do. Except, because he is a child, his understanding of what is needed is limited. A little girl comes forward with her baby sister and says that the baby is hungry and wanting their mother. Mordred gives her a cow and calls for the next petitioner.

I’m also intrigued by his choice of costuming. After his initial costume change to indicate to his mother that he is rebelling against her control, he shifts back to the costume that she no doubt chose for him. The king does not wear “new clothes” until he breaks out of childhood. And then only briefly, before old age reduces him to the clothing of his childish estate.

It’s also interesting that the majority of the images of adults with children before the spell are authoritarian and constraining. A teacher assigning homework to her class. A mother telling her child that she cannot have a sweet. A police officer catching children tagging a box car.

Without adults the world is only mildly Lord of the Flies. Sword fights with stick swords (heck I did that. When mom caught me at it, I had to wear swim goggles. It’s harder to poke your eyes out that way, but sweaty) and running with sling shots.

I loved that the children questioned the Justice Leagues right to inform their behavior. I mean, Superboy may no longer be an adult, but I pretty sure he could still kick those little boy’s hineys. Ultimately, the threat of the return of the parents is enough to force them to conform.

Superboy was a bit wasted here, but I can be content with Green Lantern’s ecstatic smorgasbord of choices for his green power. Freed from the restraint of silly, he can hardly choose from the array of options. Although, I can see why Flash isn’t in the episode, it would be hard to tell the difference.

And then there is Batman’s statement with which we close the heroic section of the story, that he has not been a child since he was eight years old. Interesting to take in context with last week’s episode, “What do You Get the Man Who has Everything.”

There Bruce’s happiest fantasy wasn’t to be an adult, but to be a child again in a black and white world where his father will save the day. His fantasy is violent with his father striking the mugger over and over as little black and white Bruce smiles and looks on. An interesting contrast to the children who in Mordred’s fantasy world drag empty adult sized armor to be decapitated in the guillotine. Children aren’t sweet. And what Bruce wants most is a child’s justice. His father’s shadow overpowering the thug with the adult Bruce’s voice.

Bruce hasn’t been a child since he was eight years old. Simultaneously, he will always be that old young eight year old. Of all the Justice League members who become children, he is the least changed because he can never change beyond that defining tragic moment. 

Batman’s emotional coldness to Wonder Woman reminds me of one of the Batman episodes. Dick Grayson, Nightwing, is arguing with Bruce/Batman, about Bruce’s inability to connect. Bruce yells that Dick cannot possibly understand his motivations to which Dick replies something to the effect of, hello, look who you’re talking to. He goes on to say, that he hasn’t let that tragedy stop him from living his life. Now, Batman’s influence, well that’s a whole other dysfunctional kettle of twistyness.

I’d ramble more, but um, I think I’ve said enough about an episode primarily built from squee and cuteness.


	15. "This Little Piggy" - Mmmm Bacon

She is Pigs iiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaace.

Okay, wait no. 

She is Woooooooonder Pig.

Okay, not exactly either. When I think of this episode, primarily I think of two things. That exchange upon the roof top, "You're an amazonian princess and I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues." It's horrible idea of a romance. He's doomed to be cranky old Bruce. And yet for all of the that, he sings.

The other is a site gag described and yet unfilmed. Joker about to pull off some sort of heist. Out of an alley comes Batman with Wonder Pig under his arm. Joker pauses and goes home. Because really, how to follow that with a joke.

I don't feel particularly blue, but I do love the classical mythology with a dinner show.


	16. Fearful, Fearsome Symmetries

When JL names an episode after a line in William Blakes' Song of Experience poem "The Tyger." A poem that serves as a dark mirror to his poem from the Songs of Innocence, "The Lamb," well... When that episode centers around a long running character being cloned.... When that episode plays off of concepts from the run of the all the different series... When the series creators start talking about this is the episode where the season's arc begins.... When...well, that makes for interesting contemplation.

Tygerish lambs and lambish tigers. Supergirl and Powergirl. Kara and Galatea. Who is the tygerish lamb and who is the lambish tiger, well that's up to discussion.

A real farmer’s daughter type with a grip like a vise. Blonde and blue eyed and wholesome pure Midwestern alien/alien clone from another planet. Uber(wo)mensch and Nitsche quotes. Wait no. It’s the Question that quotes Nitsche. The Uber merely fly.

Burning bright in the forests of the night.

With the introduction of the character the Question, we begin to explore plots and conspiracies within the JL-verse. This year it seems that rather than a threat from the stars, our characters will face off against a threat that has always been there. A threat hidden behind secret government organizations and trench coats.

This was an episode from a mature universe. 

What hand dare seize the fire.

A meaty red sauce of reference and possibilities. I just wish I had every episode from every series on DVD so I could do justice to the thing. Superman. Batman Beyond. Zeta. 

I have teasing memories of Volcana’s episode from the Superman series. When she broke free of the government organization that made her what she was, I can’t quite remember - was the head of the program her mentor or her lover. Well, it was a kid’s show, so probably mentor with implications in her voice.

The Royal Flush gang, from S2 JL, created by a “secret government group.” Ace with her mental perambulations. All gathered and created by secret government groups.

Not conspiracies. Conspiracy. Single.

The military robots that attacked our heroes from the Zeta series of robots. In Batman Beyond, a later model will be designed to assassinate the enemies of the state for some secret government group. Designed to assume the identities of others. To infiltrate. A thing that will one day become a who. Wake up” to consciousness and decide that “he” doesn’t want to kill any more.

General Hardcastle who led the defense against Superman’s finale attack. Leaving behind his military skin. Inside his cabin, it is night, while outside the sun shines.

On what wings dare he aspire

Oh, the wonderful long range repercussions.

Superman should cry Batman a river. In the Superman series finale, Darkside planted tangling vines that root beyond simple conquest.

Superman was brainwashed into thinking that Darkside was his adoptive father and Apocalypse his burning home. Lost to himself Kal-el attacks everything that he loves. There’s a lovely moment when Professor Hamilton, who had been friends with Superman throughout the entire series, confronts the newly awakened Superman. The broken Supergirl between them. Fear. Anger. The good doctor, perhaps, realizing for the first time, just how powerful Superman is. 

I often wondered when Superman mentioned Star Labs in JL how that relationship was repaired. How pleased I am to know, umm…no, it wasn’t.

That was the moment that Hamilton turned and this episode showed the fruit of that turn.

“Your kind are fickle.” “They want their own super powerful alien if it happens again.”

Galatea – Tea – Power Girl – a maiden brought to life by Aphrodite in answer to Pygmalion’s prayers. A maiden brought to life by science in answer to fearful prayers.

Clone stories always play intriguingly with the question of what if. Identical people given different circumstances becoming…in this case entangled on changeling shores.

Kara’s fear that in her sleep she is committing horrible acts. That she is becoming other than herself. Tea’s determination to destroy her progenitor/self that plagues her dreams. Both fears reflecting on the violation that set these particular events in motion: Superman’s brainwashed attack on Earth in the Superman series finale. Leading to the theft of Supergirl’s DNA.

Galatea – Who wears Supergirl’s face.

The eye soul windows and the conscience that bites. Kara sitting up from her sleep remembering Galatea's actions. Burning twin holes in the Kent’s wholesome lost lamb sheltering roof.

Dost thou know who made thee?  
Who Gave thee clothing of delight?

Alien probes, when the uber is the alien. A little Agar. A little DNA. Tomatoes; leading to Fearful Symmetries .

The Question – Who has no face. Tilts his head and the points of his round hat cast eye shadows. And a brief aside, damn I love Jeffrey Combs. 

The Question doesn’t go through Supergirl’s trash, he goes through everyone’s trash. He believes, he questions, he distrusts. Connecting cabals and bland generic boy bands.

To wonder at the Question’s identity is almost to wonder at Rorschach’s in The Watchmen. He wears faces and identities and he sings. Songs of Innocence. Songs of Experience.

“What do you think of the pre-packaged pop the kids listen to?” And I wonder if the point isn’t that the adults are supposed to hate it. The lines between pins and connections.

Gods and cabals and broken girls consumed by fire.

Softest clothing wooly bright;

No Uber mask, although Supergirl does wear little white gloves.

Coffee Bars, Third World Unrest, Global Warming. The super friends in their little club up above the blue marble world and files in dark shadowed places.


	17. Choices - Doomsday Sanction

Carving tunnels off the main eruption, to stop it before it starts. Supes could just as easily set it off, so he has to go slow.

“Fine. Why don’t we walk into the light together? I’m sure the sure the American people will be just as interested in your activities as mine. Secret weapons, illegal cloning experiments, bypassing Congress.”

“If we present a threat! You’ve got a space station floating over our heads with a laser pointing down. In another dimension, seven of you overthrew the government and assassinated the president. We’re the good guys protecting our country from a very real threat. You.”

It’s not that they’re both right, it’s…

“I don’t care get it done.” “Sent him off to the Phantom Zone didn’t you?” “How fast can you get the second team up and running.” “And now we’ve got Calibak locked up on Earth where neither side can use him.” “Sanction Doomsday.” “And would you have us help three people at the expense of billions more.”

It’s a far cry from the league at the beginning of S2 shocked at the suggestion that they wouldn’t help save Apocalypse. 

In Ultimatum, there’s a scene where the Justice League members of the episode are sitting around a round table. I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, for all I know it’s the break room. But this time, that table was a high council. The original members of the JL sitting at their round table where none is greater than the other. Even Hawk Girl recently returned to the fold. Face bare and silent. 

The cabal of Cadmus sitting around their round table where none is greater than the other. Cadmus. Seeking sisters that cannot be found. Sewing dragon’s teeth to populate their cities. It’s interesting that only one of the conspirators was new. Characters seeded over multiple series into giants. Until they all turn to look at their warthog generating conspirator. 

And the JL all turn and look at Flash. “Let’s put a pin in that theory to explore another time.” I’d wonder if Flash realizes the path he’s already sprinting down, but we are talking Flash here. 

The problem isn’t sitting in judgment on yet another Superman clone. Or locking up Calibak. Or refusing to help people asking for help because it doesn’t suit your goals. Or an increasingly isolationist feel to the Just Us League, even as they expand to include more members.

The problem is a lack of Covenant.

Every member of Justice League from Batman (I made a promise on the grave of my parents to rid this city of the evil that took their lives. By day, I am Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. At night, criminals, a cowardly and superstitious lot, call me Batman) to fame seeking Booster Gold is a vigilante. Green Lantern may be a member of the Green Lantern Core, but that agency certainly wasn’t/isn’t designated by Earth locals. It’s certainly a good thing that Diana ran away from home, that Clark chooses to uses his ability so, but ….none of them are subject to any sort of review process.

They receive accolades from the public. Except when they don’t. And those detractors are not all Livewire shocks.

“heroes people can trust, depend on. They don’t put themselves above us mere mortals the way some heroes do.”

“Not everyone’s independently wealthy.” “I’ve seen the Federal budget.” 

Doomsday, cloned from Superman and tortured to hate Superman. When I consider what fear made that kindly scientist into that cold figure at the table. The anger that could bend steal, clone a teenage girl hero with her white gloves.

“I’ll just have to try harder.” When I consider the anger at another world threatened. I don’t think it’s coincidence that Jonn wears the same face in Starcrossed as in the Christmas episode. The amount of rage it took to force his way into another’s mind and leave it empty and shuddering in the dirt.

There is an implicit promise in the minds of the Justice League members to defend Earth from the Other. To protect Justice. Peace. Life. Just as there is an implicit promise in the minds of the Cadmus team to defend humanity from the Watchers. 

There’s a problem with that. With that kind of promise it’s easy to change the rules, because your promise is whatever you say it is. Because you never actually talked with the people you’ve promised. 

By contrast, a covenant is when a promise is made within a relationship. Open, explicit, defined, communicated. 

The curious thing about Lex Luthor running for President is that his cards are all on the table. He was a criminal. He went to prison. Now he’s out. He’s selfish. He’s done enormous good. He wants to see how it all ends. It remains to be seen if he has more secrets, but I don’t think the secret is Cadmus for all its comic pedigree. This Lex chose not to shoot Superman when he could have. For this Lex anything is possible.

The arc is not really about humans versus meta. It’s about connection. Trust. Two of the Trinity leaving the third to brood in the splintered dark. Like he needs help with brooding. Although that glance makes me think in the end it will be Diana who makes the connection.

At a guess this is where everything hinges. Again. Where JL headquarters grounds to Earth. Where Batman pulls away from his friends. And pulls away and away. Broods in his mansion alone.

Superman sitting in supplication, as the lava flows, waiting to be consumed. Batman washed by bullet train tidal wave. Wonder Woman swooping in to blur a hero into the sky.

Ultimately, I think they’re going to need to make Covenant not just with each other, but with the ones they protect. Open. Reciprocal. But we’ll see.

This is just the start of the season.


	18. Pop-Heroes - Ultimatum

Resonance occurs when more than one object vibrates in the same frequency. The delicious of a shared hum.

This episode vibrated along its arc and through the multiplicity of layers that is the pop culture of heroism.

Where to start. The oldest resonance that I know. And I all scattered and reacting, what many did I miss. What I did not…the Magma men.

Learning to share the earth. Long, long, ago, in an era same and different from mine, there was a movielette, part of popular television series, Superman vs. the Mole Men starring George Reeve. Drillers puncturing that fragile shell the earth to unleash the strangely glowing Mole Men. Like the Devil in the Dark episode of Star Trek, the devil isn’t what you expect. Superman resolves the episode by asking the humans, himself an alien, to accept the different. Saying that we all have to learn to share our world.

And now Superman stands and calls his own speech corny. Delicious. Superman calls a speech corny. Superman. His cape fluttering as he shatters his shell of stone.

The Ultimen headquarters. The old Super Friends headquarters on some Teen Titan ish tower. Black Vulcan and Batman trading lines, old chum. 

When I was a child, I spoke as a child and I watched childish shows. I watched the Hanna Barberra Superfriends. All these characters some half remembered shadow figures on a stage. When I was a child, I laughed and watched strange things.

When I became an adult, the things of childhood took on new reflection.

The Wonder Twins with their unwonderous actions. Form of, oh, stop being a bucket of water. Ah, a tidal wave. The sheer force of liquid. Rain down the heavens. Open the flood. Your sister can play raven and dove. Panther. Elf. Clone.

Ah, Giganta in an episode about people manipulated from what they were. This universe’s Bizzaro in a story about clones. The clone of Superman that didn’t quite flow right. Zig zag wrong, help break boyfriend out.

Ah, Cadmus. The ancient antithetical to Star Labs. And yet. And yet. Dr. Hamilton is both.

Power and power. Batman’s are bigger than hers and yet, rich boy, don’t delve too deep. This wondrous society of loose cannons in the heavens. We’ve proved that watch towers can fall. Who watches the watchers of the watchmen.

The Question quirks and the clones float in their created memories, never to wake, their purpose broken in children’s need for identity. The one year old Samurai only ever wanted to be a hero. Someone planted that Superman was his hero. Someone planted that he was to be loyal to his government. But wild cards break free and mad men gamble in Vegas.

A conspiracy so large his superiors are small fish. And those fish are very large indeed, swimming prehistoric in water. To be a dinosaur. To be water, the stuff of life. Big stuff indeed.

And yet, Aquaman, king of the sea. A king, whose realm lies vulnerable to the world above the waves.

Secret identities are meaningless, rich boy. The shadows know the shadow man’s secrets and the heroes know only a name. Cadmus.

It takes money to be a hero and not everyone is independently wealthy. 

Power. Who has it. How it’s used. The children who freeze the Magma men all unknowing of what they want. The JL who want to communicate. 

The ultimatum between the two. Ultimate. The highest the finest. The best. Clones in an endless stream.

The runaway Apache Chief, gone to spend those last few breaths in the society that he wants. Not in shadows, but above the clouds.

The lines are drawn and I wonder, what role President Luthor to be will play in all of this. At what point will Justice League headquarters finally come to earth. Not on a tower, but on a bit of island in a bay. 

No hero an island, but one of a volcanic island chain.

Huh.


	19. Old Yeller - Wake the Dead

Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday, was never really a good man. The glitter of gold drew him to his grave in the fecund swamp soil and magic drew him soulless out. And yet, the character in JL was not defined by the illiterate rampage of his un-life, but the leaving of it. Again. 

Angry. In pain. No longer even restless seeking his lost soul, not knowing what he seeks. Instead in WtD, Grundy is the wind at the window. The rumble of the earth. The sound of things falling apart.

Chaos magic that humbles even Amazo’s vast golden knowledge, until darkness drives the returning android light years away.

Light.

In Dante’s Inferno, while there are many torments, ultimately, the true torment is to be separate from God’s love/light. Separate. Alone in a crowd in the dark. And the deeper you go into hell, the more frozen, dark, desperate, howling the winds become. The sound of Satan’s wings endlessly beating as he traps himself in a lake of his own frozen tears.

Betrayal.

Frozen.

Trapped beneath, inside. 

Shayera’s soul is winter still. Betrayer of her people, her world, her fiancée, her love, her friends. Everything she touches seems to turn to death and loss. Ash. Frost. Her wings beating, but she does not move.

The lady in the tower. The girl in the rose garden. Roses. Flowers. Blossoms that bloom in their own sweet scented time.

In the Romance of the Rose, the hero goes to a tower where he seeks to win the Rose. To have her passively open. To take her sweet fragrance into himself. Various representations of Virtues and Vices aid and oppose him. And the Rose sits within its walls and waits.

Shayera waits.

Shayera is the Rose. Shayera is the hero. Waiting to breath her own possibility, but trapped in winter. In the dark of night.

We all bring something to the table and everyone one of us is necessary to the whole. Chaotic pawns and aquatic kings. Brooding knights and fateful bishops. Queens and castles sliding across the checkered board. Queen me. The Rose, who used to defeat the Dark Knight, toppling her own pieces without care.

Fate plays strange tricks.

Life plays strange tricks.

Light plays strange tricks.

Osirus, god of the dead, holding his ankh, life. Missing a piece of himself that all his sister/wife/queen’s searchings cannot return to him. And each night, Ra journeys into Osirius’ realm. Into the dark. Each night, Ra dies. And each morning, the sun is reborn to light the world.

To wake the dead.

Redemption. 2nd chances. Believing in friends.

Because we all bring something to the table. Super and friend. 

The crack and smash of Grundy flinging Superman, who so loves to save bridges, who is a bridge, through the supports of a bridge. And the kraken rises from the depths to hold the fragile steel and stone together. And the hawk girl flies, barefaced, costumeless, reaching out.

Last season, Shayera left masks behind. Hiding. Truth-untruths. She is no longer bird nose and Grundy that bad, bad man, is longer there.

And so she goes into the earth. Into the spiraling tunnel to close Grundy’s eyes to the sparkling light of her mace that disrupts all magic.

So she stands before her accusers. The hungry reporters and the angry mortals. Turns to face them and accepts their words as her betrayers due. And yet, and yet. Ah, chica bonita.

The Dark Knight and the Castling Queen may have voted against you, but the Heart and the Shaper (his third eye long ago opened) voted for you. Love couldn’t vote. Didn’t go to the tower. It would have been a conflict of interest. But it didn’t matter, the man whose power flows from the sun believes in second chances, redemption, and friendship. 

Believes we all bring something to the table.

Last season, Shayera flew off into the sunset. This season, she walks into the sunrise with her friends. The flower turns to the sun. To light.

We all make our own destiny. Lex Luthor grabs his and clings to life so he can see what happens next. Who indeed could keep Amazo in Fate’s tower. Watching. Absorbing. Trying to figure out why we’re all here. 

Then sometimes destiny is taken from you. Grundy ripping himself from his grave to seek the boys that would call him. Children that rather then blossom in the university years, play at dungeons and dragons high school revenge. Don rented costumes and straddle unspeakable names. Unspeakable. Unknowable. Ancient ones.

Kutulu in R'lyeh lies dead, not sleeping. 

Fate is a gamble. The wind howls and hard choices freeze action. But still there is the rising sun and learning to walk into the morning before you try to fly.

Wake the dead and live.

Ah, chica, cracking the egg, good to have you back.


	20. Discovered Countries - Once and Future Thing

Justice League, Then and now, now and again.

To begin, how great was that to hear Jayne the hero of Canton shooting his shotgun, surely named Vera, at our heroes sides.

This episode was nothing so much as a mobius. We begin with a garage filled with treasure whose value is in the perspective. We begin with a relationship out of joint. With turning away in time. Then we twist to Batman and Green Lantern discussing relationships. Love that has been left behind. Love that won't come to be.

And in the background, we see the past continue to affect the present. Diana's inability to forgive Shayera's betrayal. Hawkgirl in her black and white, her face open without its masks. Spool forward as the future flies back to steal Batman's belt of many options. Batman, whose past informs his present to the degree that he won't  
wear a gun under any circumstances. Batman, whose past informs his future. When his body finally fails him and he faces death, for one moment he'll pick up a gun. He'll stare down its length at another human being. The sound of that falling to the ground will be the sound of him putting aside his other self. Of Batman ceasing to be. It will be the sound of that truely scary old man coming into unblinking yellow eyes. Who can't believe he was ever so green as to rely on physical strength to instill fear.

Past. Present. Future. Green Lantern flickers from John to Hal Jordan and back. Meets the son that represents so much not over in his relationship with Shayera. These are the slowest, biggest bullets that Wonder Woman has ever seen. This is the fiercest fight she's ever had with a clown. Watch Wonder Woman fades away as Chuckles learns  
what killed the dinosaurs. Rather than being a fortress in Metropolis, the Watchtower was destroyed. This Static 

Shock's hair is gray, not black as it was in the Static Shock/Batman Beyond crossover. Virgil has been worn by his life. Terry torn apart by his. One more casualty in that old Bruce's tapestry.

"Bruce Wayne meet Bruce Wayne, perhaps you've met?" And perhaps they haven't.

To be honest, one of the harder things in JL/JLU is that Batman Beyond seems to make less and less sense the more Batman is pulled into not alone. Not lone knight in the dark, not that he ever was for long. There's always a Robin or a Batgirl or a…

So, we end on the beginning. The beginning of time represented as a vast hand with a spiral palm closing its 

fist. Or perhaps, in the way of things and time, the creation of the universe as the act of a vast hand opening to a spiral of possibility. 

There are no breaks on this ride of time and for all that Green Lantern hates time travel, we all do it every day. Time isn't money. It's a continum, but the clowns of the world respond to the money thing.

So, our heroes find themselves sitting at a table in the Watchtower. Lives complicated by a future only they know. It's not the cause and effect of Hereafter. It's messy and tangled. Grown children and living to a bitter overripe old age. Then again, the alternative is the eternal loop. Frozen in a moment of bitterness and running away from what once was hope and love.


	21. Progressing Pilgrims - The Ties that Bind

On one level, a shallow fun little romp in the sand.

And here I turn back to the beginning somewhat. What pleases me, I like to analyze. While certainly Dante is deeper than a Harlequin (Mills and Boon to you over the ponders), it seems there is always meaning that can be squeezed because the meaning comes from our bloody heartfelt, meaningful selves.

The ties that bind. When did JLU become Pilgrim’s Progress?

Heart sits waiting to be acknowledged. Youth is tired of being ignored. He was one of the original 7. The Magnificent 7. The JL before it became unlimited and hard to tell just who is in the League. He plays at meaningless games with a character that in this series is comic relief. Elastic, plastic, bitter.

In wanders the Free. Of course we don’t know how he escapes. He isn’t a man. He’s a mask with startling contrast eyes. He’s what was small and little and constantly striving. Hope. He is an idea.

He’s come to the JL because little father has been taken. 

Two father’s in this story. Well, three, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Darkside, who is gone. His statue lies shattered on the ground. In pieces as a result of his quest to live forever. Everyone trained by Granny Goodness as step brothers. Children of the dark side. Crattered, pitted, glowing eyes and gone. 

The little snapping father. Weak where Darkside was strong. Small. Ready to be sliced by the un-mother figure. Granny Goodness.

Then too that last absent father figure. The one that’s not only super fast, but super strong. The hero everyone wants. The last son of a dead world. Or perhaps better to say other son figure. Since the events that caused Darkside’s disappearance arose from that final Superman episode where Kal-el was led to think of Darkside as father, Granny Goodness as mother, earth as just a new battleground.

But they are all gone. Whatever.

Youth and age clash. Old mind wants to let enemies growl and fight one another. Keep each other weak and Earth safe. It’s a far cry from the attitude at the beginning of S2 JL. Young flashing heart has other ideas.

And so we go. Through mazes and cake. The heart spins, gathers the fire up and walls fall. Free Hope swims in the water and emerges…well he emerges. 

However for the father figure to be rescued from the steel slice, Mind and Heart must work together. Mind guiding. Heart racing pumping pulse ahead.

In the end, Heart wants to be the Green one. To have the longer reach. Respected. Mind wants to be himself, the one that wears his own color if not shape.

The ties that bind us. Family. The ones we choose and the ones that choose us. Responsibilities to country and place and safety. The ties to other human beings. The shape of Flash’s eyes when Free talks about the only father he’s ever known. The bindings we ourselves choose when we give up hope. Whap, whap, whap goes the red hand and the manacles fall. Frozen and under a falling train. Spring free. Green. Oh, ye of little faith. Hope. Love.


	22. the Huzah Moment - "Divided We Fall"

Possibly one of my single best geek moments. Something that will always resonate for me. After episode of episode of the gently climbing arc. Twisting the rope.

The real boyscout, because he's a little boy quitting the Justice League out of sheer disappointment at the adult trauma that they are in. Who then watches the watchers. The watchers.

After all of that. The sense of claustrophobia increasing to this fever pitch.

San Diego Comic Con. They played the final (well except epilogue) of the season to a crowd of my closest bestest hearts. We watched it together. In a mass of joy. 

Sometimes a story is about a story. Sometimes its about the shared joy that comes when we watched Flash run away. Gasp and then he runs and runs and runs around the world. All the world strung together on his feet. Heart rejecting the opposite versions that Lex Luthor / Braniac displays. Running so fast he reaches between molecules to pull the would be destroyers. Consumers. Consumption. 

Instead of line of heroes pulling speed back from its force. Hand in hand.

Then the credits rolled and we jumped to our feet and screamed our incandescence.

Ah, burn bright the common experience. Burn bright.


	23. All Things End - Epilogue

What an interesting way to bring closure to Batman Beyond and close the loop of between for our league of Justice. 

The way it tied into the whole of each verse. For there was the Phantasm from the first Batman animated trying to recreate Batman, but unable to make herself commit the crime that would trigger it. Instead creating incidentally a different version. Terry as a little bit older and not having to be frozen in the eternal child self.

Stop waiting, waiting, waiting for life. Get married and save the world. 

The end is not mutual exclusive with things stopping. 

Old, old, Bruce has let the soup grow cold. Father. A sort of Father. It does make me wonder who Terry's little brother grew up to be.


	24. I Totally Don't Know Who that Is - Great Brain Robbery

The Great Brain Robbery. 

Okay, .my thirteen year old brain wants to say something, "OMGFlashhadsexwiththeevilgorgeouschick. " I'd use more text message slang, but I've never used it, as it's the opposite of languid words verbose. But whatever. Squee!.

Ahem. Now that that's taken care of, the episode.

 

The more I minnow about, the more I perceive the coral bones of consent issues throughout the episode.

Flash doesn't want to let his team members into his mind, but gives into GL's, "if you loved justice you would" persuasions. Grod chained, while Lex violates Grod's mind. The unrelaxing/unasked for touching, and unconsentful sexual encounters behind sliding doors. Lex tied up by his own people, facing sharp pointy death. Lex using the young wolves powers against himself, activated by a button on Lex's belt buckle. Even the imagery of the train robbery. The violation of reunification by the long train penetrating the cave and the attempted theft of the eggs as it were. Although, the last one may be where I took too many literature classes lo those years ago.

"Uneasy is the head that wears the crown."

Always pretenders to the throne. No sooner is the old king out, out, like a damn spot, but the wolves are growling at the gate. The first sign of weakness and they snap and snarl at your heels. And Lex, he has been foaming at the edges..

"Am you my mother?"

Yes Bizarro, Lex is your mother. He had you cooked up in a vat from Daddy's DNA But this is a work where scheming creates crooked results and things turned right around. You'd think Lex might take a moment to think when Bizarro asks this question, but villains never do. Because they're evil and they have to try.. 

This is a world where spells and science intersect with evolutionary apes as the conduit. Where it's not so much a great brain robbery, but a change partners dance. Well, so many things are.

Lex and Braniac have always been Superman villains. In this universe especially with Braniac being some last shard, some memory of Krypton. And yet, there's been a coral sea change. A transmutation in a moment. Lex doesn't change bodies with his arch nemisis. Doesn't switch with with the uber oppostion of Metropolis and Smallville, human and alien, corporate intellect versus brawny fourth estate. He spins around and is Flash, who once ran round the world and reached into Lex to rip all but heart and flesh away. Leaving mad mumbling and remenants of memory behind.

How wearisome it must feel to Lex, forced to throw sops of train heists, when what he wants is that godlike moment that once flung him up on the shoulders of giants and is now lost.

Lex's master plan is no more useful to a League of villains than turning humanity into chimps. Or apes or whatever. Plotting to turn the world bald, because Braniac would consume the world. It's what Brainiac does.

And yet, Lex isn't just mad and bad, he's dangerous to know and let tinker with your powers. I wonder if at this point there is any member of the League that hasn't been altered in some essential way. Like asking favors from the genie in the lamp, the wishes don't quite do what you expect.

Trying to rip knowledge from an ape, trying to trace a link, doesn't always do what you expect. Well, the best laid plans of mice and talking simians have a way of going awry. You'd think the heroes would remember that. But they don't. Because they're good and they have to try.

I wonder at the persistance of memory. Braniac is only in the episode as an absence. A negative space. The mearest fragment of Braniac should be able to recreate it. And yet it doesn't. This chip is a dead chip. And I wonder what that means. 

"My head is where I keep all my one liners."

It's interesting that after last season's near dissappearance of Flash, this season has so many references to him. Even in episodes where he doesn't appear there are obligatory Flash jokes, "He made a monkey out of us. - Obligatory.." and references to his presence in various corners of the globe.

In an arc where the villains are legion (like rebellious angels), serving the driving intellect of the moment, and in the background, Brainiac whispers, cold emotionless, devouring, dead...I'm not sure where I'm going with this. That's the problem with stream of consciousness writing. It's quirky like that. But if the conclusion of S2 JL dealt with the Just Us League and hard and soft power, and the S3 JLU closer dealt with truely opening the League up and the racing beat of the League's heart, I'm very curious as to how this seaon will end. The opposition of intelligent Apes/Brillant Scientists/Machine Ghosts in the Flesh with the League's...(I don't know, is it too corny to say heart? Probably. Whatever. I love popcorn.) heart is interesting.

I think it's no coincidence that Lex knows immediately how to use Flash's powers. Scientist that he is, he's probably made a study of Flash by now. Studied and considered and still missed the point. Well, he is evil. He looked in the mirror and pulled back that mask and the face was meaningless. Of course. One face in 9 billion. What did Lex expect? 

And perhaps, that's the point. In any story about heroes, I'm always very interested in unmaskings. Sometime's it's climactic. Sometimes, you peel back the mask and the CSI lab tech face that smiles back is just another face. Which given who does Flash's voice work, is just funny in context.


	25. Gurl Fight! - Grudge Match

It feels a little odd to call a girl fight episode the Bechdel episode. Sort of. There is a certain amount of the female characters talking about the common man between them.

It is a story after all about the sexualization commoditization of fighting between women.

And yet, women get to be bruisers. The femme come to a resolution and then the music plays and Wonder Woman rises from below. From the depths, she rises and they know they are freaking toast. 

Girl fight. What can I say, sometimes I just want a little warrior princess action.


	26. Hiding his Man Pain! or Not - Flash and Substance

It didn't occur to me until later that this episode co-insided with Valentine's Day. How appropriate, because this is a love poem.

When I read the description that said Batman and Orion would be seeing a new side of Flash, I expected something dark. Well, we live in a world that focuses its CSI eyes on dark spaces. The Grand Guignol. The Grr and the Argh of it.

Actually, Batman and Orion didn't see a new side of Flash. Instead we saw the same side of Flash. Clarified. Reflected. Refracted. Distilled. A truly good person, who cares about his community. Every aspect of his life in accord. His masked face does much the same work as his every day face. His red mask merely hiding red hair.

Flash tends to be played for laughs on JL/JLU. Good natured and not that bright. A bit of a lot of a flirt and offering a Mochachino to every pretty girl that smiles. 

And yet in his city of centrality, he never even notices the reporter with a crush. Some strange inversion of Clark and his tangled Lois triangle. On his day, Flash runs by the pretty girls with a smile and a sprint. And his job is umm…I never thought I’d say this…technical. He works on the minutia. The small, the mundane. Soap. Because, well, that is how criminals are caught. It’s not that it was a hidden depth. It’s that he is just that straight forward. 

Forward momentum and go.

Flash.

Substance.

And from the micro to the macro, I consider the relationship of a hero and their city.

“Don’t let them call you a crazy loner.” The shrouding fall of a cape. Darkness even in the brightest day. Dark knight for the city of the mad. His enemies the deranged and the macabre. Acid rinsed clowns, two faced Janus coin tossed friends, and the sanest is the icy vengeful heart that destroys hope now that all hope is lost. A city where over and over parents die and heroes gargoyle perch to drive the possessing spirits away. The people point at tiny figures swinging from shadow to shadow and children speculate that the Bat is not a man at all.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane. It’s. The fluttering snap of a red cape as the blue angel descends. An immigrant. A farmer come from the small ville to the anonymous city. To the metropolis where anyone can become an anything. A Moses in his basket. And when that angel dies, his memorial is his symbol. The abstraction of the man. His villains are great and grand. Digital destroyers of worlds. Dark sided conquerors. Alexandrian industrial kings. The people wave to their hero as he flies clouds high and planets far away.

Ah, Central City - “Home to the Flash.”

Home.

Every year Superman spends Christmas with his family as his bespectacled self. Clark. Leaves his city behind for some more pastoral vision. 

There might be cows.

It would seem that Batman spends Christmas with the Joker. New Years with Commissioner Gordon contemplating the passage of years and crime.

There might be brooding. Avert your eyes.

And the Flash, he plays the man in a red suit at an orphanage.

“In honor of all his charity work…”

All. 

Not donations. Wally isn’t rich. His apartment has a laundry room. Wow.

Not big gestures, but simple interaction. Painting fences. Chatting with fishermen on the bridge.

A hero’s relationship with his city. Running along the streets, trading greetings and conversation. He’s a hero who knows his liniments. The warming of the muscles. Comfort in the midst of pain. He’s a hero who knows his city by name and name and name. 

And his villains. They’re worried about mortgages and ulcers. Their Joker is a trickster off his meds. The wonderful loop from Mark Hamil as the Trickster in the 90s Flash series to voicing Batman’s Joker to JLU’s Trickster again. It’s all connected.

“Take it down a level.”

A key to the city and Flash hopes he makes them proud. Aw…

His monument, a statue of a man where pigeons can now roost. 

Of course Orion, dog of war, doesn’t understand. Pigeons wouldn’t dare roost on Darkside’s statue and that’s all Orion really knows. All Father gave Orion away into the dark. To the Grand Guignol. To a warrior’s pain and all that rot.

Uh, yeah, whatever.

Wally isn’t trying to recreate lost parents, who failed him by dying. Pulling people close to push them away. He isn’t flying at a 100,000 foot withdraw to be himself.

He is himself. Out running light and disco balls gone bad. Err…badder.

Not that any of this is qualitative. I love all the heroes in their turn. But, it’s not that often you see genuine sweetness, the centralness of the heart, put forward as an ideal for a hero. 

Which really makes me want to say, “Awwww…” A love poem for the woobie in all of us.


	27. The Egyptian Side of life  - Dead Reckoning

Dead reckoning. 

Wikepedia strikes with Disambiguation. The art of navigating by knowing where you are, how fast you’re going to know when you’ll get there. Transitioning between here and there.

I don’t actually have much to say about this episode. I'm just being a completist for now. In this transitional state. Like placing chess pieces on a board. Shifting the figures in play about. Turning techno pawns into kings. Running new old themes into the game in progress.

An episode that begins with waiting between. Not understanding why one lingers. Merely lingering. No motion forward. No destination defined. 

Between.

Comic book cosmic Karma and all that. 

Possession. Of one’s self. Controlling others.

Tala trapped in her mirror. Boston Brand lingering between worlds. Souls trapped in a mystic maguffin. Lex Luthor serving an unwanted master to get, well, he was waiting…

To remake the world in one’s own image. Wow, um, is it hubris if it’s an ape? Yeah, pretty much. 

Its interesting that Brand takes over each of the big trinity in their turn. Without permission. Out of control. Imbalance.

“Ask next time.”

Superman’s was small. To enable communication and “Why am I in Africa?” For laughs. Wonder Woman’s that bit more serious. Battering at Mantis because he killed the Master. And then Bats…with all the best intentions and bang. A life gone and a gun in Batman’s hand.

Tala freed from her mirror to serve at whatever breeze swirls her about. The souls freed from their maguffin, because nothing really ever dies in (insert random mystic name place here). Well, does anyone ever really die in comics. Lex Luthor fires his own gun to become the king. And Boston Brand…hmm, that felt like the pilot for a series. Or the lynch pin on which the door swings open, to a new vista. 

We’ll see. Perhaps, Boston can hook up with the Crow.


	28. What that's your plan? - Patriot Act

A bit heavy handed at points and yet…

An episode where it was not so much, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but with or without power comes the necessity of engagement in the world around you. Heroes not being just abilities. Star girls with their sparkle power. Vigilantes that in a name aren’t good role models, but what’s in a name? Police officers. Firefighters. Heroism not defined by tights, or even uniforms and a badge, but by action and speech. 

Action. 

Not that I want to condone children in the fray of a fight, because there’s a certain amount of scoot. And yet, Vigilante seeks to protect children by actively engaging them in the process of saving people. Not you’re too small, or weak, or young to help, but here’s a task you can do. Now go do it.

Speech. 

The cranky, crabby courage of that little old woman facing the monstrous implacable down. Demonstrating that you don’t have to be from Krypton to have a spine of steel. 

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a balloon. Pop.

Bellow all you want creature, for all his powers and hearing, Superman cannot hear you. He’s a galaxy away, saving stars. And all the crowd goers and the Generals of Disorder must make do with the second string. Plucking on the gut and bravado.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Cadmus, throughout its comet journey through the JLU cosmos, was about fear. Fear of the ally. The enemy. Fear of power without parameters. The mindset that matches guns with guns and nuclear bombs with nuclear bombs until the mutual destruction of the world is assured in multiple degrees.

“There speaks the moral decay of the last thousand years.”

Or perhaps just the decay of the shining ideal into the dirty. 

The glamorous appeal of doing dirty deeds, because they must be done. To serve. To protect. To smash. Dirty Harry relentless. Violent and unpredictable. Requiring more power. Larger guns. Stronger muscles. More impervious skin. 

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

That odd thought that the Nazi serum only made manifest what was inside Eiling. The grey flint of the muscle bound abyss. 

The very interesting contrast of the Eiling’s defense of America’s hegemony versus the Justice League of…without limits. Unlimited. Throwing open the gates and sending resources to every distant corner.

Honor. Understanding not just the surface appearance of it, but the function. The oblige of noblesse. I guess it is that with power comes responsibility, but also the responsibility to use it…umm…responsibly.

Eiling missing the essential message of the Shining Knight’s story that when ordered to carry out an immoral act by the source of supreme authority in his world, Sir Justin refused. That the JLU isn’t made up of faceless mindless minions, but individual voices. Perhaps Superman can and could just walk into Cadmus and knock the walls down. But the Justice League isn’t an army. It isn’t made up of depersonalized minds that can label lives as mere collateral damage. That protects by destroying.

It’s made up of the ideal. Of people, in all the permutations of the word, who when given a criminal order, will disobey. Who will give every last breath to protect.

And I don’t know, but there was just something about when Sir. Justin lost his helm that really struck me visually. The transformation from a knight to a young man. A brave boy who fought ogres, but is still not all that old. A lamb. In blond disarray and broken on the ground.

Protected in the end not by guns or explosions, but by an old woman. It would have been easy to make her Martian Manhunter in disguise, but instead, she’s nameless. Old. Small and weak. Human. Heroic.


	29. Power Suits - Destroyer

Man of Steel in a world of cardboard. It's like that Larry Niven essay, but without the new wave sexytime speculation. 

And yet for all of that, the man in the power suit, human to his core, Lex Luthor rises to be himself again. He's not meant to be the madman in the swamp. In his purple bandelero. No, instead, he goes to seek put on the suit that got him through saw him through the entirety of the Superman series.

Power suit. We all have them. The comfort clothes that define the us that we are taking the negotiated Darkseid of self to the edge of life the universe and everything. Combining in its way Darkseid / Braniac / Lex Luthor as some hollowed out trinity. Ah, well, they'll be happy together.

While good chases evil down the stairs for a final series send off. Run, run, run.


End file.
